Greasy Bend Page 4

  When he pushed aside his plate and blotted his lips with a paper napkin, Bond was taking her third bite of a double bacon cheeseburger. He slid his laptop in front of him. “How long have you known Alice Lang?”

  “Six years or so, but we didn’t start doing things together until three years ago.” Scrooby typed with his index fingers. “Listen, I’ll save you some time.” He looked up. “No, you’ll have to keep typing. Alice and I were not girlfriend girlfriends. She never married. I don’t know anything about her sex life. She never talked about sex. She grew up outside Wapanucka, studied accounting at East Central in Ada, worked at some car dealerships before the Chickasaw Nation built that machining plant in Marietta. There was a Turner back in her family, and some Turners still own Indian allotments, but I didn’t know if she was a member of the nation or if that got her the accounting job at the plant. It was better work than she’d ever had, and she stayed until she retired last year.”

  Scrooby belched softly and held up a hand. “Hold on.” His wrists crossed like a pianist’s as his index fingers socked the laptop keys. A minute later, they stopped. “Okay.”

  “To her—Alice—gambling was an abomination. That’s the word she used. So I don’t think she had a gambling problem. She was real generous, helped everyone in her extended family. Worked with me in the Nazarene food pantry in Tish. She didn’t wear makeup or dye her hair. She told me she’d never had a traffic ticket. I believe that. She drove so slow, it made you crazy. She was afraid of water. Got panicky when she had to drive over long bridges.

  “She walked in the country a lot, had got bit by some yard dogs. Her car was still in her drive in Wapanucka this morning. But I don’t think she walked late at night. Once, at her house, I saw a twenty-two rifle behind her front door. Typical for the country. She never talked about guns. She paid off her house in Wapanucka ten years ago.” Bond told Scrooby the address and gave him directions. Then she waited for him to catch up. “She was in her early fifties when she got cancer and had her boobs taken off. I wasn’t around her much then. When I got to know her, she had a sense of humor about it, made jokes about her falsies going south.”

  The apron boy took Scrooby’s plate. It was pretty clear the cop wasn’t still working on that.

  “The bills I saw around her house were the usual: utilities, insurance. Besides her Bible, I only saw copies of one magazine. She subscribed to Time, and she read it. She didn’t have pets—hated the dirt they made.”

  Scrooby typed a while, stopped, looked at Bond. “That it?”

  “Yep.” She went back to her burger.

  Scrooby shrugged and snapped his laptop closed. “I have your number.” Bond nodded as he slid out of the booth, paid his ticket, and left Hamburger King.

  CHAPTER 8

  Unless Sheriff Magaw had received complaints about a specific stretch of highway, he allowed his deputies to replenish the county’s coffers on any profitable stretch of road they chose. Bond usually mined a sycamore-shaded stretch of State 7 where it crossed the Blue River. The clear rapids and pools made her stop thinking. But today, she drove farther east to Wapanucka and pulled onto the right-of-way near a crook in the highway. Her cruiser was hidden in both directions. This spot was not the idyllic Blue, which drew plein air painters and well-heeled trout anglers from Dallas, but it paid out quicker than a fixed slot. It had the additional advantage of being very close to the house where Alice Lang’s nephew—the one Bond hadn’t mentioned to Scrooby—was currently squatting.

  The sheriff had no official quota, but Bond filled her customary notion of it in less than two hours. She drove a mile north of town on State 48, then, when it crossed Delaware Creek, turned east onto a one-lane dirt road that wound in and out of eroded washes as it followed the creek. In the bar ditch, brambles had snared rusted appliances and moldy sofas.

  Before she turned up the driveway, she sent Maytubby a text so at least one person would know where she had gone. A cell phone was easy to trash.

  The mailbox at the end of the driveway was a small white plastic bucket nailed to a head post on a bed frame. The rest of the frame was out of the road. On the bucket, someone had drawn a crude pig’s head in runny red paint. The eyebrows made it look sinister. Alice had shown Bond the driveway out the car window, but not the house at the end of it. Alice did not walk on this road.

  The driveway cut through heavy brush as it descended toward the creek. The ruts were paved with flattened beer cans and household trash. Slowly the light faded under a thatch of bare wind-whipped limbs that hissed like insects.

  The front yard, when she reached it, was a caked slough. A small Ford pickup with most of its lights smashed out and all its surfaces ravaged sat high atop a set of monster tires. Mud covered everything. Bond looked around the yard for a dog. No living dog, but two rusted log chains, staked to the ground.

  Fifty years before, the small house had been built with architectural adornments common to middle-class homes in the suburbs: turned porch supports, scrolled fascia, plastic shutters with circle dingbats in the center. But time and tenants had not been kind to it. Ropes of dried mud had been slung against its walls by the truck’s spinning tires. The crooked shutters glowered. A makeshift stovepipe poked out the roof and leaned toward the gable, leaking a thin stream of blue smoke. Lang’s mongrel woodpile had never been visited by a saw. It looked like a giant crow’s nest. An ax lay flat on the ground.

  Bond had not seen Jeff Lang since she arrested him for assault in Connerville two years earlier. She knew from Alice that his frightened parents had driven to Tishomingo two years before that and convinced a judge known for denying divorces to issue a restraining order on their own son. Sometime after he got kicked out, Alice had found him sleeping against a dumpster behind Subway. She woke him, fed him, gave him some pocket money. She also offered to pay his rent for a tiny shotgun house if he would take the county mental health clinic for a spin. What Alice told Bond she had learned from helping her nephew: “I should have let sleeping dogs lie.” He badgered her relentlessly—for food, clothes, money, bail, attorney fees. Beneath this running man’s pleas gleamed an edge of menace. Not long before she was killed, Alice had told Bond she was considering baking the no-divorce judge a pecan pie.

  Bond ducked out of her cruiser and walked around the truck to the door. The truck was too high to see into. She pounded loudly, took a step back, and laid her fingers on her holster. No sound from inside. She pounded again. This time she heard a loud expletive and something that sounded like breaking furniture. A few foot thumps, and the door flew open. A foul gust of old meat, oak smoke, and stale beer swept over her. Jeff Lang remained in shadow, panting. She said nothing.

  “If it ain’t the female bitch. You got nothin’ on me now, so it must be some bug crawled up your ass.”

  “Did you know your aunt Alice died?”

  Lang was silent for a few seconds before he said, “So? How’s it your business?”

  “She was a friend of mine.”

  In the dimness, Lang stuck out his lower lip and shook his head slowly. “You come all the way out here for a cry party and I’m fresh out of clean hankies.” Then he cackled high, like a very old tenor.

  “Did anyone tell you?”

  “That sow would have you for a friend. You put me in jail, and she tried to put me in the crazy hospital. She already spoke evil of me to my parents. I heard her thu my wall.

  “She won the first round. Round two, she followed me around; then when I needed some money, there she was with a wad of cash.” Lang stepped out of his house into the wintry shade. He was about a foot shorter than Bond. He wore a threadbare yellow sweatshirt with the word jackets printed on it in red, black sweatpants, and cowboy boots. His head was shaved, and he wore a shaggy red Van Dyke. His hazel eyes glistened, and the vessels in his temples bulged. He extended a cupped hand toward Bond, miming the cash offering. “She wanted me to take it. S
ure she did. You know why?”

  Bond said nothing.

  “You know why?”

  “No.”

  “She wanted to get me in debt so she could make interest off me. A shitload. I was going to be her little cash machine.”

  “How much interest did she charge you?”

  Jeff Lang glared at her. His head began to tremble, and his eyes teared up. He made fists and dropped them to belt level. “That’s neither none of your fucking business! What are you doing here?”

  “I just came to tell you your aunt had died.”

  “You done that. And you hear me say you brung me good tidings.” He smiled and raised his arms as if he were cheering. His arms remained in the air as he spun on his heel, walked into the house, and kicked the door shut.

  Bond walked backward toward her cruiser. Before she reached it, a savage, exultant scream from inside the house flushed sparrows from a yard tree. She was reminded of Jeff Lang’s face when she was cuffing him for the assault. It was all crimson with blood except the whites of his eyes and then, when he laughed, his big yellow canines.

  She opened the cruiser door slowly, using it to hide her phone while she took photos of the truck’s tire prints and some boot prints that were probably Lang’s. Back on the county road, she made a little switchback as it climbed the low bluff over the creek. She parked behind some brush, took her massive old Steiner binoculars, and walked until she could see Lang’s cabin. She stood out of the sun, behind a little stand of sumac.

  She glassed the pickup. A rear window rack held a wooden baseball bat and an old pump .410 shotgun. The cab floor was piled with fast-food litter. In the bed were a few crumpled PBR cans, a rusted weed whip, some spent .410 shells, and a small coil of quarter-inch sisal rope. The coil had been opened and was held together with a knotted strip of cloth. The cut end was slightly frayed.

  Bond drove to Alice Lang’s house in Wapanucka. There was not yet any crime scene tape on the property. The brown frame house was fenced, on every side but the street, with tall arborvitae trees that had grown together. You couldn’t see into or out of any window that was not on the front of the house. She parked on a concrete apron behind the detached garage, took some disposable gloves from a box in the console, and snapped them on.

  She opened the fuse box and took Alice Lang’s spare house key, which lay on top of some spare fuses. She opened the back door with the key, without touching the knob, and put the key back in the box. She took off her boots outside. When she stepped onto a kitchen throw rug, the room was dark. Bond could see all the way to the front of the house, and all the venetian blinds were dropped and closed. Someone besides Alice had done that, and it had required some time. Alice liked a bright house. Both the kitchen counter and the dining table were clear and clean, and a dish towel, neatly draped over the oven handle, was clipped with a daisy pin. Clipping the dish towel was usually the last thing Alice did before she left the house—right after she had cleaned all surfaces and washed any dirty dishes or utensils that had been used since she came into the house. “Tidy grandma from Dusseldorf,” she often said to Hannah as she was clipping the towel.

  So if Lang was taken from her house, she was taken as she entered it. Her purse was still on the counter near the back door. It had no zipper. Bond reached inside and spread the wallet’s cash slot with her fingernail. It was empty, which these days meant nothing. Three credit cards were nestled in their slots.

  The .22 rifle was still behind the kitchen door. Bond tilted her head back and inhaled deeply. She had never smoked, and her nose was keen. Alice Lang’s house usually smelled faintly of three things: old natural gas in its plaster walls, dryer sheets, and Pine-Sol. Today there were new scents in the mix: “boy”—that catchall for the sweat of men under thirty—and anise, sage, and oak smoke. An hour ago, Jeff Lang was burning oak. But she reminded herself that his woodpile was whatever deadwood came easiest.

  If the intruder had rifled the place, he had, as far as she could see from the kitchen, put everything back in its drawer or cabinet. Bond mentally walked into every room Alice Lang would never see again. She remembered feeling the same thing after her little sister was murdered: that the rooms missed her and needed her. Bond knew that Alice herself was the rooms, but it didn’t make sense that way. Her restless straightening hand was everywhere visible in the house. Pressed tablecloth, buffed oak floor, spotless windows and mirrors, bedspread symmetrically draped. The place always looked staged, like a museum house. Bond shook her head. Without Alice, the linens and bowls and chairs would be scattered, the polished surfaces would grow dim.

  A backfire up the road brought Bond to the beveled window in the front door. She saw, in the ghostly blur of the framing prism, Jeff Lang’s pickup creeping from behind the rank of arborvitae. She took a step back, out of the light, and looked through clear glass. The truck stopped, idled roughly. His bald head, with its red spike of beard, popped out the window. Bond could see his eyes moving over the house, but his face was expressionless. He pulled his head inside the cab, faced ahead, and stomped the accelerator.

  CHAPTER 9

  There was nothing at the Ada address on Lon Crum’s HR file and photocopied driver’s license but a chain-wall foundation and the slab and door of a buried tornado shelter. No building debris, no carbon on the concrete—the house had been gone a long time. So the HR address was not a shot in the dark. Maytubby yanked open the shelter door and shined his light down the stairs. Brown water a foot deep, a crutch floating in it.

  The house next door had cardboard window panes and Visqueen storm windows, the plastic sheeting fastened to the window frames with thumbtacks. When he knocked on the front door, Maytubby saw that a rolled bath towel had been stuffed under the sweep.

  The door opened, and a figure buried by clothing motioned Maytubby in, quickly shut the door, and kicked the towel back under the sweep. The low blue flame of an old radiant heater was the only light in the room and the only heat in the house. “Sorry it’s so cold.” An elderly woman’s voice. “And dark. But airn ’lectric or gas boss linin’ his size-forty britches with my dead husband’s sweat money. And I don’t take no charity.”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Now, Mr. Policeman, what is it you want out of me? I got airn car, pistol, whiskey, nor hot property.”

  Maytubby trained his flashlight on the photo of Lon Crum. “This young man, when he was filling out a job application, gave the empty lot next door as the address of his residence.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “Do you recognize him?”

  “Do I recognize him? I even know why he done what he done. So when he thieved from work, they couldn’t find him.”

  Maytubby looked at the blue flames reflected in the woman’s eyes. “Do you know where he lives?”

  A low wheeze rattled up from under the flames, and the floor creaked. Maytubby realized that the woman was laughing. “Across the street,” she gargled.

  “House with the red awnings?”

  “That boy is dumb as a shovel.” She nodded. “Yeah. That house. I haven’t seen him in a spell, now that all my windows are cardboard.”

  “Did you see him hanging out with anybody in particular? When you still had some glass?”

  “He always went off, even when he was real young. You go over there you’ll see why.”

  “No law enforcement officers over there? When you still had glass.”

  “Oh, yeah. For the mother or father or both. Ragin’ drunks.”

  * * *

  Before Maytubby knocked on the door shaded by a red awning, he heard the audience of a television game show. After he knocked, a woman inside said, “Well, shit.” She snapped the door open. She was holding a sweating plastic OU cup. Maytubby saw at once where Lon Crum got his saggy eyelids and urchin flair.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “I’m looking for
a young man named Lon Crum.”

  “Why?” She smiled faintly.

  “I’d like to ask him a few questions.” Maytubby looked just past her face into the shambles for any sign of the fake guard uniform.

  “You can ask me a few questions.” She leaned against the jamb. Her breath smelled like rotten pears.

  “Does Lon Crum live here?”

  “Why does a handsome Indian cop want to know?” She kept her eyes on him while she drank from the tumbler.

  “Ma’am, I don’t know that Mr. Crum has done anything wrong. Could you tell me where I can find him?”

  “You want to come in?”

  “No thank you, ma’am …”

  “Stop with the ‘ma’am.’ I’m not much older than you are. You think I am because I got a twenty-one-year-old son. You think I have the body of a ‘ma’am’?” She looked down at her chest and back to Maytubby.

  “Will Mr. Crum be home later this evening? Does he have a workplace, or somewhere he hangs out? A bar?”

  “‘Mister Crum.’ That’s funnier than ‘ma’am.’ Maybe you didn’t notice, but this ain’t England, and my son ain’t no country gentleman. This is Bumfuck, Oklahoma, and my son is a broke-dick loser just like his daddy, the other Mister Crum. I kicked ’em both out. Couple months ago. Workplace is one place you won’t find either one of ’em.” She side-eyed Maytubby and giggled. “Me, either, looks like.”

  “Do you know where your son is living now?”

  She shook her head. “He shows up ever now and then, to get something he forgot. Never has told me where he’s staying at. I asked him last time, too.” The OU cup went to her lips. She took a long draft.

  “Does he ever ask for money?”

  “Not since he moved out. You are asking me a few questions.”

  “I appreciate your help.”

  “Oh, God.” She lifted and lowered her hands like a marionette. “Make him a real boy!”